There is a variety of social systems with different levels of complexity, such as a political institution, a juridical institution, a company, and even a basketball team.

The concept of distributed system comes from the computational science field, where there is a wide range of studies related to coordination problems. The most famous coordination problem in the field of computational science is the so-called byzantine generals’ problem.

In turn, in the field of social sciences, instances of coordination problems are corruption, economic inefficient, poverty, violation of law, among others.

The ways we can solve the coordination problems within a distributed system, depends on its architecture, whose scope is to organize the process by which actions are carried out by the players.

There are three kinds of architecture: a centralized one, a decentralized one, and a hybrid one, whereas the most utilized is the centralized architecture, whose client-server model is the most famous:

“A natural model of distributed computing is the client-server model, which is able to deal with the problems generated by distribution, could be used to describe computation processes and their behavior when providing services to users, and allows design of system and application software for distributed computing systems. According to this model there are two processes, the client, which requests a service from another process, and the server, which is the service provider. The server performs the requested service and sends back a response. This response could be a processing result, a confirmation of completion of the requested operation or even a notice about a failure of an operation.( Weijia Jia, ‎Wanlei Zhou — 2006, p.16)”

However, although with the help of a centralized architecture be possible to solve many coordination problems, this kind of architecture has serios problems, especially as and when it is applicable to the social systems.

Taking into account that the knowledge about the client-server model is not enough to realize the extension of the difference between a centralized architecture and a decentralized one for a social distributed system, we need to make a philosophical and heuristic experiment.

With this scope in mind, in this brief article we are going to explain the first part of the decentralization meaning, doing use of an unusual kind of social system, at least in the context of a scientific essay, that is: a basketball team.

The advantages of using a counterfactual basketball team as oppose to a computational system concern to the fact that we can denote and connote the main features of the concept of decentralization in the context of a game, what reproduces better the business environment, as well as the social one.

Nonetheless, if decentralization is a form of distributed network system architecture, there are previous concepts we must deal with before we take the journey to the decentralization meaning, that is, we must to know what a system, a network, and a distributed network system is, as well as theirs differences in relation to the internet.

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Fundamentally, our social systems are distributed systems where information and actions are… was originally published in SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL SYSTEMS AS DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

DON’T PUT THE CARRIAGE BEFORE THE HORSE: TO COMPREHEND THE REAL MEANING OF A DECENTRALIZED COORDINATION IS THE PREVIOUS STEP TO APPREHEND WHAT BLOCKCHAIN IS

What I want to point out is that people are putting the carriage before the horse when are talking about blockchain.

Blockchain is only one among other tools so that resolving one of the most difficult coordination problems in the context of a distributed and decentralized computational system, that is, the byzantine generals’ problem.

In other words, to grasp the real blockchain meaning is not enough describing its technical features, but rather it is necessary to understand what and why to achieve decentralization is so important for a distributed system.

The question gets still more problematic or even terrible when people are talking about the use of the blockchain into social and distributed system, such as a political or juridical institution, or even in the context of a business and economic environment.

Indeed, if you leave aside the real meaning of decentralization while you are carrying out a blockchain structure into a social and distributed system, then you can damage the social system at the same time we can construct the best e the most wonderful blockchain of the world.

As a lawyer, a citizen and, above all, a lover and student of technology, I don’t want to see blockchains being used to destroy the privacy and the life of the peoples.

The risk resides at applying a blockchain structure to a non-decentralized social system, remembering that blockchain is only one among other tools to achieve decentralization, what entails that blockchain per se is not synonyms of transparency, fairness, compliance, accountability, disclosure, and other fashion words.

In fact, there are much more under the hood, such as James A. Donald wrote at answer to Satoshi Nakamoto:

“It is not sufficient that everyone knows X. We also need everyone to know that everyone knows X, and that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows X which, as in the Byzantine Generals problem, is the classic hard problem of distributed data processing”.

Here, He is talking about the concept of common knowledge, an important concept to achieve decentralization, pretty much ignored by the “blockchain personalities” from the business world.

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THE FIRST BIG BOOK OF HISTORY

Let’s turn the complex concept of blockchain into something more poetic. Imagine that you are a kind of god and that all the things which happens in the world is immediately registered into a single book, the big book of history.

If you want to know whether a man must be thrown to the hell, then you open the book and see whether he did more good actions than bad. However, you are a different kind of god, such as the ancient Greek gods, very similar with a human being, and you think that playing guitar, doing sex, and drinking a beer with your friends is more interesting than to throw men to the hell.

Really, you think that is pretty boring or even wicked doing that, but you are a god, and such as a married man, you have your responsibilities. Nonetheless, let’s suppose that you are not much diligent with your divine responsibilities, and while you are very happy doing sex, the impish devil takes the great book of history and tamper it, attributing the good actions to the bad guys, and the bad actions to the good guys.

Even though you might appraisal the acts of the devil as a little bit funny, the things cannot be so, and for avoiding that it occurs again (yes, in this situation the good guys were thrown to the hell), you create a new big book of history, namely: a Blockchain.

THE CREATION OF THE BLOCKCHAIN

The earlier big book of history had a few problems. The first one was that only one person was responsible to keep the book at secure. Remember that the book was tampered when god was doing sex.

The second one was that there was no connection between the facts, such as connections of cause and effect, once that someone could change a single fact in the past without to change the future. Therefore, the earlier book was not really the big book of history, but only a collection of facts without a living connection among them.

In fact, as the chaos theory teaches, a modification of a single fact can change the whole course of the events. How to resolve this problem? Well, establishing a living connection among the facts so that if a single fact be modified, then the whole history would be modified.

But, how to do that? Pretty simple! Within his arsenal of powers, god had a special mathematical function, namely: a hash function. Don’t be scared with the name of the function, because it works in a simple way. Think that the hash function is a machine, where you put the facts of the history and they are transformed into a unique sequence of numbers and letters. In turn, the name of this sequence of numbers is hash, a unique numerical representation of a fact, that is, a kind of digital imprint of the facts.

So, if you change a single event in the facts which were putted into the machine, then the sequence of numbers, namely, the hash is changed completely. Therefore, given a sequence of facts the solution encountered by god to assure immutability was to mark each fact with the hash of the previous one.

Bear in mind that now the devil must change not only the fact, but the hash of the previous fact. However, he cannot change the hash of the previous fact without to change the previous fact, and so on.

As a result, on the one hand, the greek god can do his worldly activities without divine concernings; on the other hand, the devil must discover how to overcome this new situation, in order to do his mischiefs.

WHAT IS THE MORAL OF THE STORY? BLOCKCHAIN IS AN EYE THAT SEE EVERYTHING

Blockchain is a technology which enables us to have part of the history on our own hands, that is, enable us to know the whole past and present, in order to predict the future. For that feature I call blockchain as the eye that see everything.

However, there are still a couple of questions we must deal with. How the facts are included within the blockchain?

What is the function of the blockchain within the context of the bitcoin protocol or other cryptocurrencies? What is the difference between blockchain and a peer to peer network?

Why to resolve the byzantine generals’ problem is so important for a decentralized system? The blockchain protocol is important to the non-computational reality? What is a protocol? There is difference between algorithms and protocols?

These and other questions will be handled by me here as soon as possible. I hope to see you again.

THE FIRST BIG BOOK OF HISTORY was originally published in Blockchain as the big book of history on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.